A former protégé of ex-McKinsey & Co. chief Rajat Gupta began testifying against his old friend and boss on Friday.

Anil Kumar, who has pleaded guilty to passing confidential information to Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam, took the stand as a prosecution witness. He told the jury about Gupta's relationship with Rajaratnam, whom Kumar attended business school with.

Much of Kumar's testimony dealt with New Silk Route Partners, the India-focused money management shop Gupta set up with Rajaratnam. Gupta, who is accused of passing tips about two companies on whose boards he served, Goldman Sachs and Procter & Gamble, "wanted to create the best asset management company in Asia, as good as the ones in America, but this would be focused on India."

"They both had a joint aspiration to raise about $2 billion for the fund," Kumar, whose testimony continued today, said.

Kumar added that many of the meetings about New Silk Route took place at Galleon's offices.

Prior to Kumar's testimony, Gupta's personal banker told the jury about her client's net worth. JPMorgan Chase's Heather Webster said that Gupta had a personal net worth of $84 million in 2008, just months before Rajaratnam told the bank that Gupta had a $16 million investment in another fund, Voyager Capital.

Separately, prosecutors said that, as at Rajaratnam's trial, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein would testify at Gupta's trial. At Rajaratnam's trial last year, Blankfein said that Gupta violated Goldman policies by telling Rajaratnam about matters discussed at bank board meetings.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Reed Brodsky told U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff that Blankfein would be the prosecution's second-to-last witness. He also said that his side intended to wrap up their case by about Wednesday.

From the current issue of

We are accustomed to splitting trading into technical and fundamental buckets. Both involve crunching data; one set includes market fundamentals and the other pure price data. Alternative data is a third bucket that is gaining traction.